I recently reviewed Star Trek: Picard Season 2 in preparation for seeing Season 3. Like a lot of people I was quite disappointed with the second arc’s arbitrary plotting and implausible writing and with this season, advertised as the last one, promising a reunion with the main cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it’s hoped that things will pick back up.
Shortly after the events of Season 2, Picard has finally developed a relationship with his aide, Laris (Orla Brady) and is planning to go on a trip with her to a Romulan aid colony. But the episode actually starts with Picard’s former love, Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) in deep space, manning a starship by herself with apparently one other person. She fends off an attack by mysterious aliens and is seriously wounded, and sends a coded message to Picard, through his old Enterprise-D comm badge, in order to avoid the notice of modern Starfleet. Picard recruits good old Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes), who confirms that none of the old crew have seen Beverly in about 20 years. Riker quickly decodes the message and finds Crusher’s coordinates, and decides to use his Starfleet connections to get them a ride out to the site at the edge of Federation space. This requires a bit of deception on more than one person’s part. At length Picard and Riker take a shuttle out to Beverly’s ship and are quickly ambushed but not before finding out that her passenger is her 20-year old son (Ed Speleers) – whom no one knew about. This raises the question of who this guy’s father is, although he has an English accent, which I think is a big clue.
This emphasis on The Next Generation is probably the direction the series should have taken all along (Episode 1 is actually called ‘The Next Generation’) but the series is still using Star Trek: Picard‘s main original character, Admiral Picard’s former Starfleet aide, Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd). She has become a street-level operative for Starfleet Intelligence and is shown trying (and failing) to stop a terrorist attack against a Starfleet facility. How this relates to the main plot has yet to be shown. It also has yet to be shown how the other principals of TNG are drawn into all this, although the navigator on Riker’s old ship happens to be Geordi LaForge’s daughter.
Terry Matalas was the main showrunner of Season 2, although on this story he seems to have done a complete re-boot, for instance putting the title sequence at the end (like on Marvel movies) and putting the secondary credits in the same font as the Next Generation credits. They’re clearly trying as much as possible to get back to the stuff fans liked about Picard and the Next Generation era, and so far it works, largely because of Jonathan Frakes’ swashbuckling spirit. It’s also got some of the more adult subject matter we’ve come to expect from this show and Star Trek’s other streaming media. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens next.